Tony Award-winning playwright John Guare has selected Australian playwright Shannon Murdoch as the recipient of the 2011 Yale Drama Series Award: Murdoch will receive the David C. Horn Prize of $10,000 and have her work published by Yale University Press.

Shannon Murdoch

Guare (A Free Man of Color, Six Degrees of Separation, House of Blue Leaves) succeeded playwright David Hare as the judge for the Yale Drama Series, which annually honors the work of a promising young playwright.

Murdoch was recognized for her play New Light Shine, "about four small-town lives linked through a violent crime and their hopeless attempts to erase the past and build new lives."

According to Guare, "The raw, haunting, richly poetic, deeply emotional, New Light Shine affected me as no other entry did."

The play will receive a staged reading at the Yale Repertory Theatre Sept. 12.

Runners up for the 2011 honor are Bethany by Laura Marks and We Three by Mary Elizabeth Hamilton.

Submission dates for the 2012 Yale Drama Series run June 1-Aug. 15. The competition is open to original, unpublished and unproduced full-length English plays. For further information visit DCHornFoundation.